Is Media Matters Trying to Rewrite The History of My State?

Anthony_McCarthy  Billy Pilgrim • 21 hours agoSorry, this was removed by Media Matters.

Uh, check out Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's record when he was the governor of Maine. He was awful. Just sayin'.

 

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  Billy Pilgrim  Anthony_McCarthy • 21 hours ago

  Please explain as he was elected 4 times and helped establish the U. of Maine.

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    Anthony_McCarthy  Billy Pilgrim • 19 hours ago

    He was a vicious proponent of capital punishment when the majority of Mainers were opposed to it. He was all hot and eager to start killing people from the time of his first inaugural speech. He was a pretty awful person.

     

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      Billy Pilgrim  Anthony_McCarthy • 3 hours ago

      I somehow doubt the majority of Mainers were against capital punishment back in the late 1860's.

      Besides, do you think Lincoln was horrible because he believed blacks were inferior to whites?

 

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  Anthony_McCarthy  Billy Pilgrim • a few seconds ago

  I believe you are quite wrong. A very large percentage were, I would suspect most. You should look up "The Maine Law" a defacto abolition of capital punishment that had been in effect for quite a while. The legislature abolished it, in effect in 1835, under the "Maine Law". Its defacto abolition happened, first, in 1876, though abolition of it was briefly repealed in 1883, it was abolished, I hope for good, in 1887.

  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was an enormous proponent of execution in opposition to that history of its abolition. Getting Media Matters to suppress that history won't do anything to change it.

Here's a brief description of capital punishment in Maine before Chamberlain took office.

For example, in 1835, Maine enacted what was in effect a moratorium on capital punishment after over ten thousand people who watched a hanging had to be restrained by police after they became unruly and began fighting. All felons sentenced to death would have to remain in prison at hard labor and could not be executed until one year had elapsed and then only on the governor's order. No governor ordered an execution under the 'Maine Law' for twenty-seven years."

I can't see any other reason for them to remove that comment.   The last one was posted after I saw that notification about removing my original comment.   Anyone who wants to read Chamberlain's advocacy for the state killing people can read his inaugural addresses.  Starting with the first one.

Here is a description of the last hangings in Maine, after Chamberlain campaigned for its reinstatement.

The last hanging was on November 20, 1885 at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The victim was Daniel Wilkinson. However, the controversy that lead to its abolition in 1876 was based on a double hanging in 1875. There was serious doubt about the guilt of Lewis Wagner who protested his innocence to the end. John Gordon, the other person hanged at the same time, was carried to the gallows bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound.

According to some who have research the matter, “There was no time to wash Gordon off and, consequently, he was covered with blood and groaning as the deputies held him in a sitting position on a soap box placed upon the trap. Wagner looked down . . . and said, ‘Poor Gordon, poor Gordon, you are almost gone.’ Wagner again protested his innocence and said that someday the guilty party would be found.”


The last double-hanging was on April 17, 1885 when two Italians, Carmine Santore and Raffaele Capone, were executed. Wilkinson was executed later that year in November, as noted above.

There Will Be No Egalitarian Democracy Without God

"Stillborn Education" from "Gods of the Modern World" by Jose Clemente Orozco

I suppose, given the things I've been talking about here for the past two months, that I should read the late Ronald Dworkin's recently published book, "Religion Without God" but I am almost certain that I never will.   From this review by Michael Rosen, it sounds like the massive mind of Dworkin tried to come up with an intellectually coherent means of creating inherent rights, equally held by all that there is a moral obligation for us to respect without God.  While Rosen seems to have to be impressed, his description of what Dworkin came up with looks like it would be as easily blown away by someone who doesn't WANT to believe it as anything else could be.  Since Dworkin was a lawyer and legal scholar, I doubt that judges and justices who were disinclined to respect rights on an equal basis would lose any sleep tossing quotes from it around in their heads.  Atheistic arguments for such things have, I strongly suspect, that defect, that they carry no power to prick any conscience.

It also looks, to me, to be something so extremely complex that it is entirely unlikely to sustain equal rights under the law in the political sphere, where these kinds of enormously complex, secular arguments are even more impotent than they are among lawyers. I doubt the reportedly impressive and mighty considerations of  Harvard-Oxford scholar Dworkin will be more than a footnote in some other, equally impotent, scholarly attempt to provide the benefits given by God, while denying that is where those came from.   I doubt that all of the collective attempts by great scholars to do that, over the past three centuries, has had nearly the moral, social and political force of any of the well known assertions that our rights are granted to all of us by God.  I doubt that those have carried any force to do more than damage the entirely more effective assertion of rights as an equal, inherent endowment of God.   The scholars are talking to each other and their words fork no lightning in the wider world, down among the common folk, where the real existence of equal rights resides.  Dworkins' arguments won't have the beneficial effect of the declaration that the truth that God granted us equal rights is self evident.

Why this is important, given the aggressive promotion of atheism among the Ivy League class of the elite, where all of our Supreme Court and way too many of our chief executives come from, is that it has a real life consequence for us all.  If they don't believe that those rights are real, if they believe that their equal distribution by God isn't real, then they so often act as if they have no reason to pretend to believe that.  The alternative, generally in the assertions of scientistic materialism, has had a malignant effect in real life.  I wrote about the source of the Buck vs. Bell decision, informed by the sciency atheism of Holmes and I think it probably has a lot to do with some other decisions by less candid justices that are obviously a denial of the truth held to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence.

The very end of the review, including a long quote from Dworkin's book shows that even these two elite thinkers are aware of the problems that I assert are unavoidable if atheism comes to dominate either a de facto ruling elite or, God help us, the general population.

Dworkin is always wonderfully clear and honest about what is involved in his position—it is part of what makes his book such a pleasure to read—and he concludes his discussion of the nature of value by explaining its limitations:

"I will not have convinced some of you. You will think that if all we can do to defend value judgments is appeal to other value judgments, and then finally to declare faith in the whole set of judgments, then our claims to objective truth are just whistles in the dark. But this challenge, however familiar, is not an argument against the religious worldview. It is only a rejection of that worldview. It denies the basic tenets of the religious attitude: it produces, at best, a standoff. You just do not have the religious point of view."

This expresses precisely my own reaction. I cannot see that describing the target of our disagreements about value as existing in a fully independent, objective realm is anything more than religion lite: the religious idea of eternal goodness without the miraculous elements of omnipotent divine will and personal immortality. Yet I am at one with Dworkin in thinking that even a fully secular individual should contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder but with reverence and gratitude. Still, behind me I hear a voice—a Nietzschean one, perhaps—that tells me that what Dworkin and I are looking at is no more than a penumbra, the few rays that remain in the sky after the sun of revealed religion has set. If that is so, then the coming night may be dark indeed.

I am not at all hopeful that the brief period of modern democracy, especially in its most expansive, egalitarian form, can survive in a world where most people don't believe that people they don't care for were granted rights that they are morally obligated to respect and take with the utmost seriousness.   The atheism which elites might find personally liberating, leaving them free to enjoy the privileges that come with their economic and social status carries a general price in the removal of the belief in a God granted equality.  We have seen enough in modern history, beginning in that emblem of "enlightenment" thought, the French Revolution,  of what happens under "scientific" systems that have that as a feature of a ruling elite.  Generalizing that convenient skepticism will not do anything but further generalize the depravity that those experiments in atheistic government have been.  I don't think there is any reason to believe people who don't believe that they have that moral obligation will act as if they do have it.  And I don't think most people will take it seriously if they don't believe that it is imposed on them by any lesser authority than God.  Indeed, history also shows how difficult it was for men, like Jefferson, Madison, etc. to live up to their declaration with a belief in God and having gone on record asserting that.

Someone who is a more careful scholar than I'm able to be should write a fuller treatment of Dworkin's book than Michael Rosen has.  I hope that some of them cast as skeptical a look at it as it deserves, though that skepticism of this kind of literature has either not been expressed or it has been disappeared in the general materialist coercion of our educational and media elites.  I hope that they don't keep their heads up in the clouds where these elites like to keep these discussions but that they seriously consider the impotence of such artificial substitutes and patch jobs are certain to have in real life, where the real issues and consequences of killing off a belief in God will happen.   With a removal of a really effective belief in the moral obligation to respect rights, the removal of one that The People can understand and believe in, all hell will break loose.

Specimen Of Thought From Those Masters of Logic, The Atheists

"Believe what you like; do it in your homes and churches and never tell anyone what to do."  Tristero1(at Salon)

I'm not sure he understood what it meant when the problem of logical inconsistency in his command was pointed out.   I'm finding that atheists are always commanding religious people to not talk about religion in public.  It makes you wonder why they keep bringing up the topic if they don't want it discussed. Only, not, since what they really want is to gull people into figuring they aren't allowed to discuss their religious belief in public.   There is every reason for the religious left to talk about their religion in public, it has been the major force for pushing things left in our history.   I mean the real leftward direction, not towards their pseudo-left.

New Comments Policy

I've had to go to requiring registration for comments because of a far heavier and expanding attempt to hijack the comments by persistent commercial trolls.   I will try to find some other way of dealing with the problem but for now this is how it needs to be.  Sorry.

More Ideas about Ideas as Molecules or Physiological Structures

Now that it's got my attention, the problems of believing that thoughts are either encoded in proteins in our brains or that they are the product of such proteins forming some higher level structures, seem to multiply rather rapidly.  Those problems would seem to not concern those who make those assertions, pretending what they are doing is science, they haven't seemed to take them into consideration very seriously.  Which is, in itself, something that is rather scandalously shoddy, sciencewise.    But, then, those who have issued promissory notes on the basis of natural selection have unbounded faith in the soundness of their standard of exchange in inverse proportion to their ability to produce an explanation of how it is related to their claims in reality instead of mere assertion.  Intoning "natural selection" has made it something of a magic word, you don't really have to take any of the often difficult steps of observation, measurement and analysis that stands up to review, what science is supposed to be based on, you just have to say the phrase.   If you short circuit the process by going from hypothesis to declaring,  "natural selection" in lieu of actually doing the work, it works if you're allowed to get away with that.   And it has been working for more than a century, especially when the assertion is around our thinking and consciousness.

One of the more obvious things about ideas is that they don't form fully blown, they develop as a process of our minds working them out, quite often consciously, as the result of conscious volition.   That conscious volition, by the way, would have to be founded in the physical structures proposed to constitute all of our thoughts and the consciousness they are alleged to be based on.  The objects of that volitional thinking would have to, somehow, precede their own motivations and creation.

If they are the product of our genes, the units of heredity, then that would mean that "idea proteins" would, necessarily, be being constantly produced that are specifically matched to the ideas in some unique way, so as to produce new ideas that hadn't previously existed in the brains of the people having those ideas.   And each "step" in the development of what is considered a final idea is, in itself, an idea, which would, in itself, require its own specific chemical encoding.  Those would have to relate, quite intimately, with, not only the final idea, but also each of the intervening ideas, good and bad, in the chain that produced them.  Each would require its own protein encoding to produce that idea. Each would have to be related to each other but with constant variation.  Since we can recall discarded ideas in that chain of thoughts, they must persist.

But you inherit specific genes that produce what they produce, that was determined prior to the the observations that motivated those new ideas.  How would the DNA know how to produce the necessarily novel molecules that specifically matched, no, not just matched, but which would create ideas appropriate to those novel, never before encountered, motivating experiences?   I don't think that DNA is capable of doing that,  I don't think our entire genome, much smaller than was believed when these ideas about ideas were generated, is capable of doing that.  With ideas, you are not talking about the mere unfolding of biological potentialities that developed through the history of our human and pre-human ancestors, you're talking about the development of ideas about things that are entirely novel, which, in many cases, don't exist in nature, ideas that are entirely unlike anything which has ever happened in human minds before.  How would the DNA know how to produce the proteins needed for that?  How would these newly born and always novel proteins know how to fold correctly to be biologically active in the brains that would have to deal with them in order for them to do anything?

And, now that we have gotten around to discussing that those imaginary proteins that the DNA is supposed to produce, let's do discuss that if you are going to talk about ideas as physical entities, of bio-chemistry, you really are talking about them as active in actual biological activity.   In order for genes to develop the appropriate molecules specific to a thought, they would have to form before the idea that they were the physical embodiment of existed.   Which is a neat trick, one which I doubt could be explained in terms of natural selection.

The experience of thinking isn't like an artisanal process that matches a produced object to the conception of it, thinking produces wildly varied thoughts that are part of the continuous experience of our consciousness.  In reality, we aren't talking about discrete steps, we aren't talking about anything that can be turned into discrete entities or areas any more than we can the teaspoons of water flowing in a brook.

We pretend that the experience of thinking, consciousness is divisible into separate ideas, though how you separate an idea from its antecedents in the process of thinking them into existence or the interrelated ideas which, somehow, interact with an idea, modifying it with each new facet that interaction exposes. The real nature of ideas, of thoughts, of consciousness is undefinable and, I would suggest, unknowable in terms that could ever honestly be treated with science.  Ideas aren't really links in a chain in which one follows the other, the process of coming up with ideas is unlike that or any other physical metaphor I've been able to recall or think up.

There is probably no object that is an "idea" that could correspond to a molecule of which it is the origin and within which it resides.  And if you want to insist that, well, it might not be a molecule but a structure comprised of proteins, you have only multiplied the difficulties of how the body knew how to produce the appropriate building blocks that, somehow, appropriately formed into those structures.   That is especially true if you want to pretend that they were the result of natural selection.   Natural selection, in itself, is a metaphor, it isn't a fixed description of a physical law, though we are always pretending it is.  It has undergone rather drastic modifications within its relatively brief period as the central dogma of evolutionary biology, none more drastic than it being fixed to the concrete units of inheritance that genes are so often considered to be.  If there is anything that is probably reliable about it, it is that it will continue to undergo modifications, as, indeed, the idea of genetic inheritance has and will.

The effort to reduce the incredibly complex and largely unknown and largely unknowable "thing" we call evolution to the primitive notions about genes held decades ago even as the incredible complexity of genetic inheritance was becoming obvious, is already anachronistic.  Everything is far more complicated than science can ever hope to even describe in the most general of terms. Evolution is certainly no one "thing".   Yet that is what all of this reductionist effort rests on.  It is a product of atheistic culture, of ideological desire for ideological supremacy, not of disinterested science.   It is motivated by the same, primitive desire to kill off God by reducing consciousness and the experience of consciousness, thoughts, ideas,  to the kinds of objects that can be explained by the materialists' God substitute through what it presents as a substitute for religion.   And, as pointed out the other day, they can't demote the ideas they hope to debunk to mere chemicals without also demoting the science they claim to hold in such reverence when they do so.  It is on that science, so damaged by their quest, that they base their quest.   Its asserted reliability, essential to that effort, is hopelessly debunked by their effort.

I will note that none of this, none of this at all, looks remotely like random activity of molecules and atoms operating under the presumed laws of probability.  Its character doesn't lead anywhere near the currently favored materialist explanation of everything, up to and including the multi-verses that such atheists invented for a similar purpose.   I don't think there is any way to honestly present the thoughts of people through that kind of assertion.  Intoning "probability" would also seem to be an acceptable means of inserting magic into alleged science these days.

These are just some thoughts I will throw out to  motivate consideration and to, frankly, confound the materialists who have gotten away with peddling their line of bilge for far too long among the far too ignorant mid-brows in the media and in pop-culture.   They talk nonsense and ignorant people, gulled by their habitual awe for anything called "science," are taken in by it.  In the even more crude, even more anachronistic, even more unscientific application of such pseudo-science in politics, the inadequacy of those ideas, those notions, those habits of thought, become extremely dangerous.

Hristo Vitchev Quartet - Weber Iago's: 'Aurora'

Weber Iago, Piano
Dan Robbins, bass
Mike Shannon, drums
Hristo Vitchev, guitar

I'm still amazed that I'd never heard of these guys before January.

Some Questions About Ideas As The Expression of Molecules

As I was thinking about the problems of trying to reduce ideas to a molecular form, the entire thing looks massively far fetched to me, in thinking about what I've read on the topic, it seems ever more far fetched.   Since the brawl, discussed below, came up over the alleged existence of "empathy" as a product of natural selection, in its modern form, that would mean that those ideas were inherited as behaviors through natural selection.

In terms of materialist dogma, they would almost certainly have to be coded in proteins that were the product of specific "empathy genes" that were what was inherited.   But that is quite a problem, in itself.   Do proteins of sufficient complexity form as quickly as we have new ideas?   And, once one is formed, how does its form become modified to represent a new, twist, as it were, in the idea?  Every step between vague consideration and final "proof" of an idea involves myriad different ideas, if that soup of thoughts can realistically be divided into ideas. [In editing this the idea that that division of continuous thinking into discreet ideas isn't exactly a certain and non-problematic act,  I don't think it can honestly be done.  Is every fraction of a second during which an idea exists in our experience, in our mind but is not formed represented by its specific molecule?]

I briefly searched for time ranges for the production and folding of proteins to see if those have been estimated and haven't found much to go on, though what I have found would lead me to think that the idea, just on the basis of the time it would take to form an "idea protein" and for it to go through the rapid and extraordinarily unpredictable modifications that our ideas take in our most direct experience.*

When you start cogitating on an idea, you never know what you're going to put into it in terms of additional information, speculations, hunches, personal predilections and preferences (many of those not consciously included or even admitted to), things you'll take up and reject, sometimes reconsidering those rejections and putting them, often in modified form, themselves, back into the process.   How does the gene, coded to produce a specific type of protein, deal with all of that?   And how does it know how to edit out the bad content from the good?   Our ideas, we aren't born with them, if there is one thing we can know with absolute confidence that is the case.  They aren't formed automatically and unrelated to our own volition, they are frequently the process of intentional effort, for varying motives, honest curiosity, dishonest motivations.  And that brings us to the quality of the product. Some ideas are developed in an effort to find the truth, some with the intention of deceiving other people to rob them or use them or to enable the liar to get away with something.

Ideas aren't the simple, definite entities that the breezy materialist presentation of them as the neat packets of genetic heritability insists they are.  They are as varied as the indices of all of the books in all of human history times some enormous number that could, plausibly, be infinity.   And that is just what we can safely say about human ideas, internal human experience and conception of the universe.  About that of other species, we aren't really even that definite about.  The only thing we can know about that is that human beings have never experienced life as a member of any other individual of another species in any other genus, family, order class, phylum, or even, possibly kingdom or domain has experienced. Everything said about that is human speculation, based on the consultation of human experience of being a human being with our individual experience.

If the range of possible human ideas exceeds the physical capacity of our physical constituents to form the appropriate molecules in which the materialist would imprison thoughts by one or more than one, then the theory that our consciousness is the mere product of chemistry and physics becomes massively implausible.

And that is just considering the matter on the materialists' own terms.   When something other than a material basis of consciousness is considered to be possible, anything the materialist can come up with could merely be a physical artifact of something that is motivated by something entirely different, something that can't fit into their hermetically sealed maze for particles to move around in.  Given the problems with the materialists' belief on its most basic terms, its wild difference from my own experience of thinking, I find an immaterial consciousness that is unlike physical matter, operating on other than physical laws and which is able to interact with physical matter in ways more subtle and unlike those things science deals with entirely more plausible.   Throwing the words "natural selection" into the gap of scientific knowledge of consciousness seems to me to make the effort less instead of more plausible.

*  Here is a post from the somewhat less dogmatic atheist, Larry Moran, on what was known about one stage of protein production, folding, and the many problem of just that process.  And I doubt it's anything like a final word on that topic.

Update:  The more I think about this the more obvious it is that that our consciousness, our thoughts, our ideas cannot be the product of material causation. We talk about all of those things as if we really can define any of them.  The assertion that we know what an idea consists of, as if it were a definite thing that comes into being and has a definite form and character is merely pretense.  There isn't anything that constitutes a final entity that is an "idea".   Ideas are constantly changing and are developed on an individual basis.   Every idea is always contingent, it is always in the process of development, there is no way to fix an idea as final and unchanging.   There would be no means of applying such an idea to novel situations if that were the case.  The new application would have to alter the idea.

Pretend that there is such a thing as an idea that assumes a final form.   If it is represented in a final form by a specific molecule or physical structure then it would have to have been derived from an extraordinary number of previous, related ideas, which would have had to exist as entities discrete enough to have also had a physical basis.  The final form would have to develop from the incomplete form.  But thoughts don't exist as static entities fixed in some Platonic form, they exist in time and in the ever changing, ever fluctuating conditions of our minds.  

If the molecules of the final "idea" are formed of the ruins of the previous molecules that they supersede, where does the memory of those previous states reside?

Nope, I think the idea that our minds are the mere expression of molecules and physical structures is not credible.  It isn't molecules all the way down because there is no "thing" to be comprised of those molecules and, anyway, where are the molecules?   Our brains would have to be full of them in order to account for that idea and they would have to each be significantly different from the others in order to constitute a different idea.  

Fraud In The Gaps

Well, I'll confess that I already broke my Lenten resolution to not get involved in brawls with atheists.  It was about consciousness, specifically, "empathy" as a product of natural selection, something which is not and never will be vulnerable to confirmation or falsification due to the fact that the "behavior" that it would be necessary to observe is lost for all time in the remote past.  And that's  not to mention the necessity of collecting statistics on the variable reproductive rates of individuals who did and who didn't perform acts deemed to constitute "empathy,"  something that those pseudo-sci guys never seem to get around to discussing.

Atheism,  as the word is usually used today should really be considered just another word for "materialism" or "naturalism" or "physicalism" or whatever neologism a materialist comes up with as the others fall into disrepute.   The most basic aspect of our knowledge, the certain and most vitally experienced fact of our consciousness, is an enormous problem for atheism.   Everything we experience, everything we sense, everything we can be persuaded to consider as reliable knowledge, rests on that primary experience of our consciousness and there is every reason for people to believe that their consciousness isn't like matter.   

As the covert propagandist of materialism, Carl Sagan, so dogmatically put it, "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be."   When he said that he was expressing the most basic article of faith of atheism, as it is almost always articulated, replacing God, in effect, with physical matter and the physical forces that act on that matter.  It is veiled expression of Sagan's materialist faith.  If that view of life, of the universe is to stand then the problem is to convince people that their consciousness is just like any other material entity.  The big problem for that effort is that most people don't conclude that from their own experience, even atheists don't really believe it.   

I have mentioned the observation of William James, that a materialist who insists that religious experience is a manifestation of the physical state of their body has to immediately contradict their faith holding in regard to their own ideology.   If religious ideas are merely the working of physiology, on a more basic level, the product of body chemistry and the physics of those, then atheism, materialism, science, mathematics, even logic must also be nothing but the working out of the peculiar chemistry that is found in the bodies of those people who have those ideas.   Developing that idea, you can safely conclude that the materialist dogma on this would, effectively, equalizes all of those various and conflicting ideas, making them as equal as any other chemical reactions are mere products of unconscious matter.   A. S. Eddington, perhaps among others, said exactly that:

Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then, if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.

You can see what a problem that is for atheism.   If even basic mathematics is to be held to be an articulation of brain chemistry, that the asserted material structure of thought "is all that is or was or ever will be,"  there is no legitimate means of preferring one over the other.  You have to exit the closed maze of materialism in order to assert that one is preferable to the other, a scientist and mathematical thinker as accomplished and subtle as Eddington was, pointed it out.   For the materialist wanting to assert a scientific basis of ideas, of thoughts, of consciousness, it is even a greater problem than it is for the atheistic mathematician.  

When atheists assert that consciousness and the product of consciousness are merely the expression of matter, they create an impossible situation for science. 

Science is not contained anywhere except in the minds of scientists and students of science, it is entirely comprised of ideas that they have.  If those ideas are the expression of chemistry, presumably having physical form in complex molecules, any variation of those molecules would have to constitute different ideas.  Any variation in the idea must have a corresponding difference in molecular form and any difference in form would have to  constitute a different idea.   If that is the case any idea that someone has, which changes, which is modified, which varied, at all, in expression would have to be the product of a different molecule.  And those modifications would come about through personal consideration, the personal experience of tossing those ideas around in those "brain only" brains in the way that we do any idea to make sense of it.   It would almost have to be true that no two scientists could have the same concept of an observation of nature or anything that scientists derive from those observations, up to and including laws of nature, probably no scientist could maintain a stable idea about science that wasn't constantly changing as they thought about it and compared it to other observations and ideas.  If that's the case then even the most basic laws of physics, chemistry, biology, even the most basic axioms of mathematics and logic, would have an indefinite and nebulous existence, being different for just about, if not for every single scientist, student of science, for every single person who held those ideas.  That would be a most basic negation of the universal truth of science, mathematics, logic, of every single idea that people can have.   That would produce the ultimate in solipsism.   It would have to or it would have to entirely deny the possibility that there was anything knowable as being true, something that is entirely at odds with human experience and the claims of atheists.

As I have said before, materialism can only matter, it can only be true, if it is wrong.  

One of the most common items atheists pull out of their grab bag of bromides, buzz words, misused terms of formal logic (for which Sagan must also be credited) to insert irrelevantly in their assertions is the accusation that someone is looking for "God in the gaps."   What is so funny about that is that atheists, treating matter as God, are the foremost practitioners of doing that, today.   In no other aspect of atheist polemics is that more true than when it treats consciousness.  The "hard problem" of turning consciousness into a material substance was the special project of Francis Crick in the last decades of his life.  At his funeral his son announced that he had, in fact, failed to dispose of consciousness as anything but the mere product of chemistry and physics.   He failed to put the final "nail in the coffin of vitalism".   Why he should have been trying to do that, pretending his ideological quest was science when it was merely ideological, is an interesting question.   Over and over again, atheists within science have used science to promote their atheism.   The history of the social "sciences," the behavioral "sciences,"  abiogenesis,  multi-universe cosmology, neuro-science, ... are either explicitly motivated by an attempt to promote materialistic ideology as science or they hijack actual science to do the same thing, all with the tacit, if not explicit, approval of other scientists.   They are always asserting the soundness of the "promissory notes of materialism" that Karl Popper admitted such scientists were always issuing, when those notes have, one after another, come up as unpaid.   Those empty promises are promoted on the faith in the materialist exposition of reality, they are sold to a public that is generally as unaware of the scam as they are the ideological motives behind it.   None of this is sound science, as seen above, it is philosophically bankrupt.  

An interesting sideline to this is found in this article on Truthout, of all places, in which the failure of a molecular explanation of mental illness is discussed.  

Question:  In Anatomy of an Epidemic, you also discussed the pseudoscience behind the "chemical imbalance" theories of mental illness - theories that made it easy to sell psychiatric drugs. In the last few years, I've noticed establishment psychiatry figures doing some major backpedaling on these chemical imbalance theories. For example, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times stated in 2011, "In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance' notion was always a kind of urban legend - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists." What's your take on this?

This is quite interesting and revealing, I would say. In a sense, Ronald Pies is right.Those psychiatrists who were "well informed" about investigations into the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders knew it hadn't really panned out, with such findings dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. But why, then, did we as a society come to believe that mental disorders were due to chemical imbalances, which were then fixed by the drugs?

Dr. Pies puts the blame on the drug companies. But if you track the rise of this belief, it is easy to see that the American Psychiatric Association promoted it in some of their promotional materials to the public and that "well informed" psychiatrists often spoke of this metaphor in their interviews with the media. So what you find in this statement by Dr. Pies is a remarkable confession: Psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn't really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn't panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.

By doing so, psychiatry allowed a "little white lie" to take hold in the public mind, which helped sell drugs and, of course, made it seem that psychiatry had magic bullets for psychiatric disorders. That is an astonishing betrayal of the trust that the public puts in a medical discipline; we don't expect to be misled in such a basic way.

But why now? Why are we hearing these admissions from Dr. Pies and others now? I am not sure, but I think there are two reasons.

One, the low-serotonin theory of depression has been so completely discredited by leading researchers that maintaining the story with the public has just become untenable. It is too easy for critics and the public to point to the scientific findings that contradict it. 

I will note, to end, that psychiatry has polled as the most atheistic of medical specialties.   Which may have a bit to do with their particular denomination of bad promissory notes in that materialist market place.